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Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Sunday Times does the election

The
Sunday Times Does the Election

a
view from across the pond

From
Camille Paglia

Talentless,
venal Clinton deserved to lose. . . . any other Democrat would have
won this election because so many people voted for Trump just to stop
the utterly sociopathic Hillary from gaining office. . . . Bill
Clinton was a skilled politician – I voted for him twice – who
knew how to negotiate with people and enjoyed public life - but
Hillary had none of these qualities. . . she rose to prominence on
her husband's coat tails and never accomplished anything on her own.
. . her attempts to reform healthcare as first lady were a disaster .
. . she became senator for New York through pure nepotism . . . as
Secretary of State she spent a lot of time on airplanes meeting
people and shaking hands . . her only legacy was destabilizing North
Africa . . . we must terminate all connections with the Clintons . .
. they must be consigned to the dustbin of history . . . they have
drained too much of our mental and political energy for 25 years.

From
John Glancy in Wilkes-Barre. Pa.

77
year old Joe Brown voted for Obama in the last two elections. . .
this year he switched to the Republicans . . . why? . . . we need a
change . . . Obama did nothing . . . Brown loathes the system and the
“Washington elites” . . . people are angry about illegal
immigration . . . in Wilkes-Barre the Hispanic population has
increased by 523% . . . it would have been difficult to find a
candidate worse placed to win in Wilkes-Barre than Clinton . . .
academic, dynastic, elite . . . Maureen Frank, 58, believes people
voted for Trump because “they're uneducated, they're idiots” . .
.

From
Niall Ferguson

. .
. the politics of the Republic has always been a blood sport . . . at
least this year we didn't have an actual duel of the sort that killed
Alexander Hamilton in 1804 . . . the economist Paul Krugman wrote in
The New York Times, “people like me . . . truly didn't understand
the country we live in . . . We thought that the great majority of
Americans valued democratic norms and the rule of law. It turns out
we were wrong. . . a huge number of white people living in rural
areas don't share our ideas of what America is about. For them it is
about blood and soil (Hitler's German: Blut und
Boden) refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based ideas –
my italics) about traditional
patriarchy and racial hierarchy. . . I (Ferguson) received an email
from my old university, “we have heard from students, faculty and
staff who have expressed anger, anxiety and fear . . .take care of
yourselves and give support to those who need it” . . . the
Founding Fathers provided for this . . . Alexander Hamilton warned
“of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the
greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court
to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants”. . . It
will not be like that. This is how democracy in America was and is
meant to work . . . the hysteria
on the left is partly because being this wrong has to hurt . . . the
Princeton Election Consortium gave Clinton a 98-99% chance of winning
. . . how did they get it so wrong? . . . it was very close . . .
Clinton was predicted to get 47% of the vote, she got 47.7% . . . the
pollsters critically underestimated Trump's vote
. . . predicting he'd get 44% . . . in fact he got 47.5%. . . most
waverers and undecideds chose Trump . . . if just one in a hundred
votes chose Clinton over Trump she would have won 307-231. . . nice
try, but no
cigar . . . Democrats assumed the Electoral College would help their
candidate . . .it did not . . .because Trump spoke in
so derogatory terms about
Mexicans and Muslims, partly because his campaign won the support of
white supremacists, the standard liberal answer is race won it for
Trump. . . at first sight the whitewash theory seems to be supported
by the data. . . Trump beat Clinton 62%-33% in counties that are at
least 85% white. . . in placed where 97% of the population was born
in America he won 65%-30% . . . yet 29% of Hispanics voted for Trump
- same percentage of Asians and 37% of other racial groups – even 1
in 12 black Americans voted for him . . .but, class turned out to
matter at least as much as race. . . your income, your education and
your distance from a big city were at least as predictive as your
colour . .

the
hillbillies were not too drunk or drugged to vote. . . for the
average American family the last 16 years have been a round trip via
a massive financial crisis . . . Yale economist Ray Fair's simple
model which predicts elections on the basis of economic performance
clearly pointed to a Democratic defeat. . . lots of well-educated
Americans voted for Trump . . . more than half of the over 64's voted
for Trump, less than third of
18-24's. . . women voted for Trump 53% of them. . . the status quo
offered by Clinton can be summed up as SNAFU – but the alternative
may well be FUBAR. . . the word “work” featured nine times in
Trump's victory speech . . . deal with it.

From
Ron Liddle

I
see that John Kerry, the US Secretary of State has been on a trip to
Antarctica. Good move. Get used to it John – it's where your
staggeringly inept party will be, metaphorically, for at least four
years. Get used to the silence and the desolation and the
whale-blubber sandwiches. . . the list of utterly pointless people
ferried to the North or South Pole by the climate change monkeys is
so lengthy they even asked me to go on one of these daft beanos . . .
why would I do that? . . . it's cold there . . . I do not believe, as
does the President-elect that climate change is a “Chinese hoax”
. . . I think climate change is probably happening . . . it's all the
attendant baloney that makes me wish to reach for my revolver, if I
had one . . . perhaps the most stupid policy was the rush for diesel
. . . children can now look forward to choking, nausea and turning
blue as a consequence of nitrogen oxide poisoning . . there are calls
to ban diesel cars from London's roads . . . But nothing beats wind
farms . . . nothing comes close . . . the Scots in particular are
gung-ho and aim to destroy the beauty of their entire country by
planting them wherever . . . they do enormous damage . . . offshore
wind-farms are basically Moulinex blenders for gannets and kittiwakes
. . . they discombobulate whales and mince bats (I include this
article just to show that Mr Trump is not alone in his environmental
scepticism!)

Sunday Times lead editorial page 18

The election of Donald Trump broke so many precedents it is not
surprising that the world has been left wondering what will happen
next in Washington . . . Mr Trump's victory was not quite a “Dewey
defeats Truman moment . . . but it came close . . .pollsters expected
a clear win for Clinton, the most optimistic model gave him a 29%
chance . . . it is important that Trump's victory should not be seen
as the end for free trade, open markets and globalisation . . . the
election, after all, was between two candidates notable for their
lack of appeal – Mr Trump was regarded by enough people as the
lease worst . . . another Democratic candidate might have won easily,
just as another Republican might have beaten Mrs Clinton by a larger
margin . . . Trump won because he spoke directly to the American
working class . . . in the rust belt they probably do not expect him
to reopen mothballed steel mills and closed coal mines (I'm not so
sure about that!) . . .the Democrats are losing touch with their
traditional power-base but have not quite lost it . . . people need
to be convinced that open markets benefit them and not just big
corporations . . . people do not like open borders and uncontrolled
immigration . . . Politicians who ignore, this, as Mrs Clinton mainly
did, will suffer . . . Jean-Claude Juncker always strikes the wrong
note on behalf of the EU. “We need to teach the President-elect
what Europe is and how it works, predicting two wasted years whilst
Trump tours a world he doesn't know . . . Angela Merkel, whose open
door immigration policy ranks as on of the gravest errors of recent
times, offered to work with Trump only on the basis of the values of
democracy, freedom and the rule of law and the dignity of man,
independent of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual
orientation or political views . . . Europe seems determined not to
learn anything from Trump's victory . . . our “special
relationship” may become rather important again in the next few
years.

A
snippet Teresa May – better safe than sorry

The
Prime Minister wore a sari to visit a temple in Bangalore for the
final day of her trip to India last week. It's now traditional for
visiting leaders to wear the costume of their host country. George W
Bush and Vladimir Putin wore traditional silk jackets in China in
2001 and Chilean ponchos during a summit in Santiago in 2004. So,
here is the appeal to Teresa May, when Donald Trump comes to Britain
for his first state visit, we beg of you: don't let him anywhere near
Brighton beach and its nudist beach.

From
Adam Boulton

Donald
Trump is making nice . . . He praised and looked forward to dealing
with Barack Obama . . . he told Americans they owe Hillary Clinton a
debt of gratitude . . . even professional protesters got a backhanded
compliment . . . just like Brexit, no-one saw this coming –
including the candidate himself . . . several hours after the polls
closed the Republican pollster, Frank Luntz stated flatly that Mrs
Clinton was the next president . . . (I'm just guessing, but he
may now be looking for another job) . . . Nationwide Mrs Clinton
got 444 000 more votes than Mr Trump, but Trump won 30 states to
Clinton's 20, so nobody (except real hard-core numpties!) is
disputing the result . . . the winner has abandoned his claim that
the system was rigged . . . an unabashed Nigel Farage hastened to the
US offering to the the “responsible adult” in the room when the
PM and the President meet . . . nobody in the US was remotely
interested in what Britain was saying . . it seems with each new
President we have a nervous breakdown over whether we are cringing
low enough before our masters and whether they really love us . . .
his team: veteran right-wingers who remained loyal to him, many of
them failed candidates – Rudy Guilianil, Mike Huckabee, Newt
Gingrich, Chris Christie . . . these are all establishment figures,
not blue-collar insurgents . . . and none is a noted friend of the UK
. . . Trump's priorities are domestic . . . Mrs May should be
careful . . . hugging the President
(watch out for your bum Teresa!) got Tony Blair involved
in Iraq and Afghanistan . . . Trump's foreign policy statements have
been contradictory, sometimes isolationist, sometimes aggressive . .
. to tie the UK too closely to Trump in the hope of scavenging from
the billionaires table would be rash.

From
Heather MacDonald

America's
Republican elite are as stunned by Trump's conquest of the White
House as the Democrats and the press . . . They shouldn't be, since
they created the conditions that led to his improbable victory . . .
for decades the Repubs suppressed the debate about the costs of mass
low-skilled immigration . . . questioning the open borders policy led
to charges of xenophobia or were simply ignored . . . immigration was
said to be unalloyed good . . . however, residents of areas with
large numbers of low-skilled immigrants were experiencing a different
reality exemplified by California, the state most transformed by mass
immigration . . . the majority of babies now born there are Hispanic
and Hispanics have expanded their numbers six-fold since 1970 . . .
in the 1950's and 60's California led the country in educational
achievement, today the percentage of students lacking the most
rudimentary maths and reading skills matches those in Miss,
Louisiana, Alabama . . . (so why are Californians still voting for
the Dems?) . . . Hispanics have the highest rate of unwed teen
pregnancy of any group in the nation . . . low-skilled immigrants
depress the wages of less-educated workers . . . in 2016 only two in
three American adults without a college degree were working . . .
thanks to competition from low-skilled immigrants . . . to go by his
campaign performance Trump would seem a deeply-flawed national leader
– thin-skinned – childishly vindictive and almost pathologically
narcissistic but voters were willing to overlook his failings because
he voiced their concerns on immigration . . . the Republican
establishment could have prevented the Donald's rise years ago by
subjecting its open borders orthodoxies to empirical testing and to
good faith moral criticism . . . it has fallen to a boorish reality
TV star to articulate some basic truths: the citizens possess the
right to police their borders; a country's immigration policy should
serve first and foremost the interests of its citizens; and
lawlessness in one area breeds lawlessness in many others . .

Trump's
famous “wall” is far less important than the enforcement of
immigration laws in the interior of the county, including against
employers . . . the country watches breathlessly for every hopeful
sign that the seriousness of the office he has won will make Trump
mature and teach him long-overdue impulse control.

Jeremy
Clarkson – as usual had the last word

Almost
all my friends are bleeding-heart liberals . . .they host
fund-raising evenings t buy padded bras for people with trans-gender
issues and they are utterly bewildered and devastated by the Brexit
vote . . . they cannot understand why we are leaving because everyone
they ever met in their pastry shop and dinner party and on the
touch-line of every school sports pitch wanted to remain . . . of
course they are completely stunned by the Donald Trump thing, because
the Americans they know seem so sensible . . . “I was with Gwyneth
only last night trying out some smoothies and she's such a lovely
girl . . . they can't understand the US election result because they
all go to America a lot and to them the place always seems so
reasonable . . . they stay at the Mercer in New York and Shutters on
the Beach in Santa Monica California . . . all the celebs were for
Hillary and she lost . . . (I've been trying for what seems a
life-time to explain to the English that the real America lies, in
general and in the most part, between New York and California) .
. .

Now
they are wondering if democracy has had its time . . . if I were to
suggest that people with low IQ's (another one of Adolf's great
ideas!) should be given less of a say in who runs the country
than those in Mensa, most would nod sagely and say pensively, “It
may have to come to that, because it's ridiculous that my cleaning
lady has the same influence in an election as me.” . . . But I'll
let you into a little secret . . . all those words that I cannot use
any more in this newspaper . . . all those jokes no-one can say any
more on TV . . . all those phrases that are no longer socially
acceptable in Notting Hill and the home counties . . . well, up North
you will hear all of them, all the time . . . political correctness
simply doesn't exist in a Doncaster pub . . . because there is no
time to worry about the correct word for “cross-dresser” when you
haven't got the money . . .in parts of America there are people who
spend all day in a queue for the food bank . . . how much of a shit
do you think they give about trans-gender issues or polar bears” .
. . in parts of Britain all my friends see from their Range Rover
window as they drive to Scotland for a bit of shooting are towns and
villages full of young people who have nothing to do all day but
reproduce . . . Dims breeding dims, is what my grandfather used to
say . . . every time there's an election some politician come on the
TV they half-inched (stolen, I translate from British to American
– ain't I wonderful!) to say he will make life better, so they
vote for him and then find out later that his idea of underprivileged
is actually someone who wants to dress up in a frock (dress).
. . yes my heart bleeds for those who are bullied because of their
sex or their looks or their sexual orientation, but it only bleeds
because I've got a ton of money and two houses . . . if I had an
empty larder (kitchen cupboard) and a rash and a terrible
hacking cough, I assure you of this: I wouldn't care a bit . . .
Trump talked a lot of nonsense in his campaign, if I were to meet him
I'd probably dislike him on a cellular level; however he said the
politicians had let the poor down . . . Ker-ching; he said they would
always let the poor down . . . Ker-ching . . . and the only thing
that could provide them with jobs and money was business – big
business . . . Ker-ching again . . . they said, Yep, the future's
bright, the future's orange . . .happily I have a solution . . .The
Palace of Westminster is to be closed for essential repairs . . .
MP's will have to meet somewhere else and I reckon they should all go
to Hartlepool (they hung the monkey – I mean yes they really did
hang a monkey – look it up on Wikipedia) . . . after a few
years in this former steel town they might start to understand that
in the big scheme of things Eddie Izzard's right to wear a pink beret
is not that important (look that one up as well)